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MechScape has been reborn as Stellar Dawn
deviliscious
Member UncommonPosts: 4,359
So they are scrapping mechscape, changing it, and calling it something else now? This is not surprising, considering Jagex's history with not being able to make up their minds.
"Sadly the game was not as complete as we wanted and we spent the first few months trying to “fix” the game where we could. About a month or so ago we took the decision to stop trying to “fix it” as we still wouldn’t have the game we wanted and the game certainly did not meet all the objectives and specifications established in the original game design document and therefore it would be better to go back to the founding principles and build the game we always wanted –Andrew is now overseeing the project and working very closely with the team to build Stellar Dawn, not all was lost as we naturally have developed the game engine substantially over the last few years and the new designs benefits massively from this as well as a ton of experience within the team as to what works and what doesn’t. So whilst the content and a lot of the game play will change from what was previously built almost everything else will go straight back into Stellar Dawn."
•MechScape has been reborn as "Stellar Dawn"
•It will benefit from the engine improvements made for MechScape
•The gameplay and content will be different (so anything you heard about the game may no longer be the case)
•"Stellar Dawn will have a PVP aspect" (source)
•It will have free/members as RuneScape does, but will probably be more expensive. (source, source)
•RuneScape creator and Jagex founder Andrew Gower is now in charge of the project
•They hope it'll be ready to launch in 2010 (but no guarantees)
Comments
Not suprised they gave up on it, considering it was around 6 months to a year over due. Hopefully it will still be run the same way Jagex have ran their previous games, Hopefully there will be a bigger off site pvp clan community then there was before, as the current one with RuneScape is at the brink of dieing. Also interesting to see that Andrew Gower has taken over the project. Don't really see it being released for another 6 months knowing jagex to be honest.
Will edit later.
HERE's the real story behind it:
Jagex cans MechScape at enormous cost
Jagex CEO Mark Gerhard has confirmed that RuneScape successor MechScape has been canned just prior to its release, GamesIndustry.biz reports.
The decision, he told our sister site, was made in August when the assembled game failed to meet the standards of Jagex's new CEO and his team.
"Initially the reason for building MechScape was that we would learn all the lessons from RuneScape having run it for around four years at the time.
"It got near completion and we discovered, oops, it didn't do all of those things that we wanted it to. So we went back to the original design document and said 'let's do it again'."
Cancelling the project at such a late stage has made for an expensive learning curve, admitted Gerhard, although he agreed the company's continued financial success helped the situation.
"Yes, it's a luxury that we are doing well and we can afford to make the decision. I didn't make the decision lightly because it's effectively cost us tens of millions of pounds. Maybe more."
But it was vital, he said, for Jagex to release a game it was proud of and that its team would want to play. "It's crucial to me we don't just ship a title because we've built it."
"The previous game wasn't a game that we want to play. As much as we ended up thinking of it like a baby - we were 'reasonably' proud of it, we thought it was a good experience and we'd achieved something - it wasn't a game ready for launch.
"It was expensive. I hope never again to have to make the same decision twice. But it was the right decision."
Not everything has been lost, however, and Gerhard says that much of the game - including its engine - will be reused in the new secret project the Jagex development team is now working on.
"A lot of the content will change," he said, "a lot of the gameplay will change. Exactly what the game will look and feel like I don't actually know because the guys are working on it as we speak. But we've got that arsenal of lessons and everything else."
This new title will be released within a "meaningful timeframe" he added with a smile. At Game Horizon's Best of British event on Wednesday, Simon Seefeldt, the company's head of business development, was more specific, saying Jagex's next game will appear sometime in 2010.
Ending on a positive note, Gerhard said the new MMO's development team has been "galvanised" by the decision that's been taken.
"I've been in the organisation for two years now and I've never seen that team so excited since I joined," he said.
"They've spent years of toil on this and never quite got there, and now the entire team, sees what the plans are to change and what the new game will be. There's a real buzz in that studio, which is fantastic. The guys are doing an incredible job of bringing this to market."
While I confess that I was following Stellar Dawn/Mechscape, it was more out of morbid curiosity. They claim that this game will be "ground-breaking" or something.
Given that Jagex needlessly has wed themselves to technology that they developed more than five years ago, and limited their delivery to a highly restrictive platform (a web browser), this game really is going to need to be something special to survive.
Over the years, of course, most former and current Runescape players have come to realize that the company is full of shit 99% of the time. So while I'm willing to take a look at the game, I'm not really expecting too much. Living in their little UK development bubble has really given Jagex an undeserved sense of achievement and they really believe their own PR.
Anyone heard how their work on " stellar dawn" is going?
Based on the videos I've seen; it seems a mixture of EVE and Halo, with primitive graphics. It seems advanced for a browser-based game, but I don't know how it'll hold up. It might dominate it's genre(the browser MMO) of MMORPG's, but will it stand a chance to EVE Online, Guild Wars, EverQuest, World of Warcraft, or even? RuneScape, mind you? Hopefully it isn't another bust like War of Legends.